ERIC HOLDER…Richard Cohen is unhappy with Eric Holder’s role in the Marc Rich pardon, and Ezra Klein agrees with him:
This stuff was no great secret. The Obama camp weighed these qualms and dismissed them. Which suggests that Holder’s tendency to be a company man was not considered a negative. I’m not one who thinks the attorney general should be some sort of lone renegade within the administration, but he should feel empowered to aggressively push back against abuses of presidential power. Holder’s history offers little evidence of that sort of temperament.
I don’t have any special brief for Holder one way or the other, but I guess I’d look at this differently. Holder’s role in the Rich pardon is obviously disturbing, as he himself has admitted, and there’s no doubt it will get raised in his confirmation hearings. But the real question is whether this was an isolated mistake or evidence of a pattern, and so far I’ve seen no evidence to suggest the latter. If you think his error in the Rich case was so egregious that it ought to disqualify him forever from government service, I guess that’s defensible, but it’s hard for me to read things that way. If we barred from high office every person who failed even once to stand up to his boss, we’d have a pretty small pool of candidates to choose from.
In fact, not to get too contrarian here, but if Holder learned a lesson from the Rich pardon — and his own response to it suggests he did — it might push him in the direction of being more independent than he otherwise might be. It could end up being a blessing in disguise.
